The inner compass of the professional politician is a weather vane. The political winds having shifted, no one should be shocked that Joe Biden is now against what he was for, the Hyde Amendment.
Category: Politics
Asymmetrical Polarization: Which Side Is Mainly Responsible?
Political polarization is said to be asymmetrical when one of the political poles bears more responsibility than the other for exacerbating the polarization. But given the fact of polarization, it comes as no surprise that the Left blames the Right and the Right the Left. We all seem to agree that polarization is not good, but we disagree as to who the main culprit is.
We are polarized over polarization!
As a conservative, it is blindingly evident to me that the Left bears the lion's share of the blame. Leftists have moved much farther to the Left than rightists to the Right. But leftists don't agree, and being the recalcitrant bunch that they are, one cannot reasonably hope to change their minds. But you never know, and in any case the following may help to buck up my fellow conservatives and supply them with ammo for the ongoing war.
Here are some issues on which leftists (Democrats in U. S. politics) have gone far to the Left while conservatives (Most Republicans in U.S. politics) have maintained moderate positions.
Immigration. The Republican position is moderate: curtail illegal immigration, but allow legal immigration. The Democrat position is extreme: allow wide-open immigration of any and all. Make no distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Abolish ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). The extremism goes as far as the Orwellian absurdity that one can have border security without border barriers. Oppose President Trump at every turn, even though any reasonable person can see that construction of a border wall is necessary, although not sufficient, to stem the tide of incoming illegals. And on top of it all, lie brazenly as Speaker Nancy Pelosi has done that the border crisis is a "manufactured crisis."
Voting. Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats are advocating lowering the voting age to 16. Others want to extend the franchise to felons, allowing those who cannot properly order their own lives to have a say in the proper ordering of society. Still others wish to permit illegal aliens to vote. The extremism of this is evident.
U.S. Constitution. Prominent Democrats advocate the abolition of the Electoral College and changing the number of seats on the Supreme Court.
And so it goes. Here are three others that you can work out for yourself.
Capital Punishment.
Abortion and Infanticide.
Free Speech.
Religious Liberty and David Brooks
A re-run from 29 October 2016. I lay into the insipid David Brooks.
…………..
The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are plenty poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading. But the following from Brooks (28 October 2016) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right:
The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are prepolitical: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party. Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics, Scripture behind voting guides. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.
Come on, man. Don't be stupid. The Left is out to suppress religious liberty. This didn't start yesterday. You yourself mention conscience, but you must be aware that bakers and florists have been forced by the state to violate their consciences by catering homosexual 'marriage' ceremonies. Is that a legitimate use of state power? And if the wielders of state power can get away with that outrage, where will they stop? Plenty of other examples can be adduced, e.g., the Obama administration's assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.
The reason evangelicals and other Christians support Trump is that they know what that destructive and deeply mendacious stealth ideologue Hillary will do when she gets power. They support Trump not because they think the Gotham sybarite lives the Christian life, but despite his not living it. They understand that ideas and policies trump character issues especially when Trump's opponent is even worse on the character plane. What's worse: compromising national security, using high public office to enrich oneself, and then endlessly lying about it all, or forcing oneself on a handful of women?
The practice of the Christian virtues and the living of the Christian life require freedom of religion. Our freedoms are under vicious assault by leftists like Hillary. This is why Trump garners the support of Christians.
The threat from the Left is very real indeed. See here and read the chilling remarks of Martin Castro of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights. Given Castro's comments the name of the commission counts as Orwellian.
ADDENDUM (6/7/19) We who rolled the dice for Trump have been vindicated in spades. He has kept his promises. The cause of religious liberty is much better off than it was under Obama, and much much better off that it would have been under Hillary.
Are You a Right-Wing Extremist? Take this Test!
The following is from a Salon article. The enumeration is mine; I did, however, preserve the order of the bulleted list in the Salon piece. After each item you will find brief and not-so-brief commentary by your humble correspondent.
The XRW chart contains 20 examples of behavior which could indicate right-wing extremist values and suggest that a person is being radicalized into joining that dangerous movement.
Some of these warnings are:
1) Describe themselves as 'Patriots'
A patriot is one who loves his country. Patriotism is a good thing, a virtue. Like any virtue, it is a mean between two extremes. One of the extremes is excessive love of one's country, while the other is a deficiency of love for one's country. The patriot's love of his country is ordinate, measured, within bounds. The patriot is neither a chauvinist (jingoist) nor a neutralist. Both are anti-patriots. He loves his country with an ordinate love. He loves it and seeks its improvement, but not its "fundamental transformation." One does not love that which one wishes fundamentally to transform. One who does seek such a "fundamental transformation" is no patriot.
The patriot is also not a xenophobe since ordinate love of one's country does not entail hatred or fear of other countries or their inhabitants.
Patriotism, defined as the ordinate love of, and loyalty to, one's country is morally justified. It is justified analogously as love of, and loyalty to, one's family is justified. You love your spouse and you are loyal to her. The partiality this implies is not only morally permissible; it is also morally obligatory. Similarly with the partiality the patriot displays toward his country.
There is nothing 'extreme' about being a patriot.
2) Refers to Political Correctness as some left wing or communist plot.
Political Correctness does in fact originate with the Communist Party.
Communism as a political force, though not quite dead, is moribund; but one of its offspring, Political Correctness, is alive and kicking especially in the universities, the courts, in the mainstream media, in Hollywood, in the Democrat Party, and indeed wherever liberals and leftists dominate. To understand PC one must understand the CP, for the former is child of the latter.
In her fascinating memoir, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (Oxford 1990), Healey mentions the tendency leftists have of purging one another on grounds of insufficient ideological purity: it is almost as if, for a leftist, one can never be too far left. Healey writes:
The great irony of the McCarthy period is that we did almost as much damage to ourselves, in the name of purifying our ranks, as Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover and all the other witch-hunters combined were able to do. One of the most catastrophically stupid things we ever did was to choose this moment to launch an internal campaign against white chauvinism. (125)
'White chauvinism' was the term used in the '50s in CPUSA circles for racism. After singing the praises of the Party for its commitment to racial equality, Healey continues:
However, with the white chauvinism campaign of 1949-1953, what had been a legitimate concern turned into an obsession, a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign. Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense. Debate was over. By the very act of denying the validity of the charge, you only proved your own guilt. Thousands of people were caught up in this campaign — not only in the Party itself, but within the Progressive Party and some of the Left unions as well. In Los Angeles alone we must have expelled two hundred people on charges of white chauvinism, usually on the most trivial of pretexts. People would be expelled for serving coffee in a chipped coffee cup to a Black or serving watermelon at the end of dinner. (p. 126 emphasis added.)
Healey goes on to describe how she herself was brought up on a white chauvinism charge, was forced to admit guilt, sign a statement, etc. She details how it was impossible to criticize even the most incompetent of Black party members. (pp. 126-129)
Not much has changed in this regard. There is nothing a liberal fears more than to be labeled a racist, and, like 'fascist,' 'racist' is a term they apply indiscriminately to their political opponents as an all-purpose smear word.
3) Describe multicultural towns as 'lost'
I don't know what this is supposed to mean. No comment.
4) Looks at opponents as 'Traitors'
Surely some of the political opponents of conservatives are traitors and are rightly viewed as such by us. But not all. Some are stupid. Some are ignorant. Some simply lack life experience and knowledge of history. Some have been brain-washed, or to put it more mildly: ill-served by their supposed 'educators.'
No 'extremity' here.
5) Use the term 'Islamofascism'
Well, Islam, a combined political-religious ideology, is in fact totalitarian. If one conflates fascism with totalitarianism, then 'Islamofascist' is an accurate descriptive term. If so, it is not 'extreme.' The calm and measured Michael Medved, no extremist, used 'Islamofascist' some years back and so did I. I no longer use the term because I reserve 'fascism' for the political ideology of Benito Mussolini.
6) Make generalisations about Muslims and Jews
Generalize we must. There is no thinking without generalization. But one can generalize well and arrive at truths or generalize poorly and promulgate falsehoods.
True generalization: Most of the terrorist acts in recent decades have been perpetrated by Muslims.
False generalization: All of the terrorist acts in recent decades have been perpetrated by Muslims.
True generalization: Jews as a group are more intelligent than blacks as a group.
False generalization: Jews for centuries have been murdering Christian children and using their blood in religious ceremonies.
Clearly, there is nothing wrong or 'extreme' with generalizing about Muslims and Jews — and everything else — so long as one does it correctly with attention to fact.
7) Have XRW extreme group stickers or badges on clothing and personal items
What, for example, the MAGA logo on a hat?
8) Make inaccurate generalisations about 'the Left' or Government
I need an example of one of these 'inaccurate generalisations.' Everyone is, or ought to be, opposed to inaccurate generalizations.
9) Talk of an impending racial conflict or 'Race War'
Who is talking about a 'race war'? Examples needed. There is of course much talk nowadays about the possibility of a hot civil war, and some of this talk emanates from the race-baiting Left.
10) Threaten violence when losing an argument, although claiming that XRW groups protest peacefully
This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The threats of violence are mostly from the Left. Consider the threats against President Trump.
11) Become increasingly angry at perceived injustices or threats to so called 'National Identity'
This is another example of a deep lack of self-awareness on the part of leftists. It is certainly rich to hear identity-political leftists complain about those who speak of national identity. As a matter of fact, nations do have their own unique identities, and every nation has a right to preserve its identity. There is nothing 'extreme' about that.
Salon article here.
Why are So Many Jews Democrats?
Paul Gottfried may have part of the explanation:
Most Jews dislike the Republican Party because they associate it with the idea of a Christian America. And since the 1960s, as Peter Novick exhaustively shows in The Holocaust in American Life, blame for the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews has shifted in both Jewish and non-Jewish accounts from Nazi pagans to white Christians. The Holocaust is now routinely—perhaps most starkly in a book by Daniel Goldhagen—placed at the doorstep of Christian civilization. In my view, this shift is based on reckless generalization and feeds into an unjustified Jewish hostility toward religious Christians. But it’s nonetheless convinced many Jews that even Christians who appear to be effusively philosemitic are really anti-Jewish. Democrats, meanwhile, are supposedly friendlier to Jews because they are cleansing public life of traditional biblical morality, most of which ironically comes from Hebrew Scripture. From 2016 to 2018, while the Trump administration was trying to hammer home that Democrats were unfriendly to Israel and, by implication, to American Jews, Jewish identification with the Democratic Party went from 71 percent to 79 percent.
Related: Paul Gottfried on Propositionalism
Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant. . .
. . . but not for the obstructionist crapweasel Democrats who will say and do literally anything to destroy a duly elected president. They understandably do not want their skulduggery to come to light.
One of the signal services of Mr. Trump is that he has forced the Democrats to show their true hard-Left colors. He has caused the scum of the Democrat party to rise to the very top to be seen in the plain light of day. Trump has clarified our politics. He is the Great Clarifier. To call him the Great Divider is knuckleheaded. The divisions were already in place. He merely gave effective voice to one side of the divide — which is what drove and drives the Dems crazy.
The Democrats, stumbling down the road to impeachment, were stunned by President Trump’s executive order on Thursday.
The order is in two parts. First, it directs the intelligence agencies to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation that was the vehicle used to spy on candidate Trump’s campaign and President Trump’s administration when it was new.
The second part of the order delegates to Barr the president’s authority to declassify — or reduce the level of classification of — anything that the intelligence agencies will give him.
The Facebook Offload
I have offloaded a good deal of my political linkage, 'rantage,' and commentary onto my FB page. But given the state of the Republic, it is important to punch back against the destructive Left in every venue and from every platform. So I will continue to post political material here. You may try to avoid the political, but don't expect it to reciprocate. You may seek to evade the totalitarians and retreat into your private life, but it is the nature of totalitarians to seek total control. Retreat into your private life, and you may wake up one day to find that there is no private life.
Free speech! Use it or lose it. But the Constitution that protects our rights is just paper without a certain backup element:
The Pelosi Argument for Limited Government
Limit the government and thereby limit the number of idiots in government.
Federal Rats Flee Sinking Ship
The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible.
One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump.
Two, the Trump administration’s Russia policies were far tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted Russia in Syria, upped defense spending, increased sanctions and kept the price of oil down through massive new U.S. energy production. He did not engineer a Russian “reset” or get caught on a hot mic offering a self-interested hiatus in tensions with Russia in order to help his own re-election bid.
Three, Russia has a long history of trying to warp U.S. elections that both predated Trump and earned only prior lukewarm pushback from the Obama administration.
It’s also worth remembering that President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had been recipients of Russian and Russian-related largesse—ostensibly because Hillary Clinton had used her influence as Secretary of State under Obama to ease resistance to Russian acquisitions of North American uranium holdings.
As far as alleged Russian collusion goes, Hillary Clinton used three firewalls—the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm and the Fusion GPS strategic intelligence firm—to hide her campaign’s payments to British national Christopher Steele to find dirt on Trump and his campaign; in other words, to collude. Steele in turn collected his purchased Russian sources to aggregate unverified allegations against Trump. He then spread the gossip within government agencies to ensure that the smears were leaked to the media—and with a government seal of approval.
No wonder that special counsel Robert Mueller’s partisan team spent 22 months and $34 million only to conclude the obvious: that Trump did not collude with Russia.
Most of my political linkage and 'rantage' is over there.
Will I Vote for Donald J. Trump in 2020?
Absolutely.
I didn't support Trump's nomination. In fact, I wrote many posts against it, one example here. But when Trump gained the Republican nomination, I realized that no serious conservative could fail to support him given the alternative. So I decided to roll the dice and encourage others to do so. The gist of my reasoning in two sentences: With Hillary, we know what we will get. With Trump, there is a good chance that we will get some of what conservatives want. Ergo, etc. A nice tight little enthymeme that I unpacked over many a post, e.g., in Catholics Must Support Trump.
What happened in the last two and one half years is that we conservatives got far, far more than we expected. The Orange Man is proving to be a great president:
. . . Trump has accomplished more in two years than his four immediate predecessors accomplished in four to eight years.
The economy is in the best shape in modern history. New and better trade agreements have been developed with the major economies. Our defense is much stronger, including a stronger and better funded NATO. Our principal adversaries — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea — are more off-balance than they have been in decades. Each of them is tough and ruthless, but they see in Trump someone who understands them and is equally tough in defending his country. And, with the collapse of ObamaCare, Trump has a huge opportunity to advance an effective, market-based approach to American health care coverage and cost control to help everyone.
Belying the hysteria of the left, all Americans are moving forward; these are not “sad times,” and there is no “crisis.”
This raises the central question to be framed in the next election: What should we demand of our president? If we’re looking for dignity, manners, grace and orderliness, Trump is vulnerable. If we’re looking for strong leadership to provide real opportunity for economic advancement for all Americans and a strong defense of America and its interests, then Trump has a claim to greatness over his current opponents and his predecessors.
The weak field of Democrats presents voters with a virtual Hobson’s choice. It will be interesting to see how they choose.
So yes, I will vote for Trump in 2020.
Speaker Pelosi Defames Attorney General Barr
Nancy Pelosi, that mendacious tool of Democrat delusion and self-destruction, beclowns herself once again.
Frustrated that their Russian-Trump conspiracy narrative has gone up in smoke, Democrats are looking to hang an obstruction of justice charge around President Trump’s neck and are targeting Attorney General Barr as a convenient scapegoat for getting in their way. Speaker Pelosi’s accusation of criminal conduct against Mr. Barr is a desperate act that crosses the line into malicious falsehood of her own.
Speaker Pelosi followed the example of such lightweights on the Senate Judiciary Committee as Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, who made the same charge Wednesday during Mr. Barr’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on which she sits. Senator Hirono followed up her baseless accusation with this bit of self-praise: "Please, Mr. Attorney General, give us some credit for knowing what the hell is going on around here with you." The only thing that Senator Hirono deserves “credit” for after her disgraceful performance during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing and during Mr. Barr’s Wednesday appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee is how easily she embarrasses herself.
Should Felons Have the Right to Vote?
Bernie Sanders thinks that felons should have the right to vote even while incarcerated. That is a foolish and irresponsible view.
1) Felons have shown by their destructive behavior that they cannot productively order their own lives. Why then should they have any say in the ordering of society? Why should the thoughtful vote of a decent, law-abiding citizen be canceled out by the vote of an armed robber, a rapist, a drug dealer, a terrorist, or any other miscreant? That could make sense only to someone who substituted feeling for thought.
Criminals have no interest in the common good; their concern is solely with their own gratification. They do not, as a group, contribute to society; they are, as a group, a drag on society. So I ask again: why should they be allowed to vote? And how many of them would even want to vote if they weren't given incentives by leftist activists?
I concede the following. Some 'felons' have been wrongly convicted. Some felonies should be misdemeanors. There are different classes of felonies. Some felons reform themselves and become productive members of society. But none of these concessions affects the main point, namely, that it is foolish and irresponsible to maintain that felons as a group should have the right to vote even while incarcerated.
2) Sanders:
. . . the right to vote is an inalienable and universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older. Period. As American citizens all of us are entitled to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and all the other freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights.
By this logic, felons have the right to keep and bear arms even while incarcerated. After all, Second Amendment rights are "enshrined in our Bill of Rights." And they are "inalienable and universal." But of course, there are excellent reasons to deny felons the right to buy and own guns, and in particular the 'right' to pack heat while in prison! You would have to be insane to to think that an armed robber's right, qua citizen, to keep and bear arms is in no way affected by his history of armed robbery. Rights can be lost, limited, and forfeited. Rights cannot be coherently thought of as absolute and unexceptionable.
The right to free speech does not give a person the right to say absolutely anything in any context. There is no right to freedom of religion if your 'religion' involves human sacrifice. The right to freedom of assembly is limited by property rights. You have no right to assemble on my property without my permission. There is no right to block public thoroughfares or destroy public property. Individual property rights are limited by legitimate eminent domain considerations. Eminent domain laws have been misused, but that is no argument against them in principle.
But doesn't capital punishment violate the right to life? Capital punishment does not involve a violation of a citizen's right to life: the murderer or anyone who commits a capital crime forfeits his right to life by committing a capital crime. If I use deadly force against you in a self-defense situation in which you threaten my life, and in so doing cause your death, I have done something both morally and legally permissible. It follows that I haven't violated your right to life. Rights violations are by definition impermissible. By your action, you have forfeited your right to life.
Sanders tells us that the right to vote is a "universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older." But if it were truly universal, then children should allowed to vote. Why the restriction to 18 years and older? Nancy Pelosi recently maintained that the voting age should be lowered to 16 so as to involve young people in politics. But why 16 and not 14? Think of how many more young people would be involved in politics if the voting age were reduced to 10. The stupidity of this is obvious and the motive behind it is transparent.
3) Sanders on voter suppression:
Indeed, our present-day crisis of mass incarceration has become a tool of voter suppression. Today, over 4.5 million Americans — disproportionately people of color — have lost their right to vote because they have served time in jail or prison for a felony conviction.It goes without saying that someone who commits a serious crime must pay his or her debt to society. But punishment for a crime, or keeping dangerous people behind bars, does not cause people to lose their rights to citizenship. It should not cause them to lose their right to vote.
It is true that a person who is justly incarcerated does not cease to be a citizen. But it hardly follows that he retains every right of a citizen. To underscore the obvious, the prisoner is not free to come and go as he pleases. He is not immune to searches and seizures. Etc. Limitation and suspension of rights is part of the punishment.
And then we have the obfuscatory leftist talk of 'voter suppression' and 'mass incarceration.' One does not suppress the vote of illegal aliens; they have no right to vote in the first place. Similarly, one does not suppress the vote of felons; they have no right to vote.
Sanders apparently thinks that 'people of color' are the victims of voter suppression because they are disproportionately represented among the prison population. The suggestion is that they are incarcerated to keep them from voting. Nonsense. They are disproportionately incarcerated because they are disproportionately involved in criminal behavior.
Damon Linker on Never-Trumping Neo-Cons
Why do never-trumping neo-con nitwits such as the bootless Max Boot allow Donald Trump to live rent-free in their heads and drive them crazy? That's my formulation of the question, not Linker's, but he provides a good answer to it ( emphases added):
More fully than any other faction in the American commentariat, neocon pundits believe axiomatically in the goodness of America — in the nobility of our national aims, and in the capacity of that nobility to sanctify the means we use to achieve them. They believe that all good things go together under the benign rule of the global Pax Americana. What's good for the United States is automatically good for all people of good will everywhere, who with our help get to enjoy ever-greater freedom, democracy, and prosperity. This is the neocons' faith. They believe it as fervently as any adherent of any religion.
But of course not everyone in American politics takes this view, and so there is partisanship, with the neocons working to uphold this pristine, highly idealized, and empirically unfalsifiable vision of the U.S. against various heretics and apostates from the faith. Until the rise of Trump, most of these heretics and apostates were found on the left, with a few (like Pat Buchanan) popping up from time to time on the paleocon right. From their home in the Republican Party, the neocons sometimes won these battles and sometimes lost. But the cause was righteous, so every defeat was admirable in its way and merely temporary — a prelude to the next victory.
Those who described Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 primaries as a hostile takeover of the Republican Party were correct — at least from the standpoint of the party's Washington establishment, which very much included the neocons. But unlike the establishment's other factions — wealthy donors and business interests out for another tax cut; lobbyists hoping to advance the interests of an industry or group of citizens — the neocons couldn't just play along with the changing of the guard. They were much too high-minded to accept the debasement of the presidency and the party. There was thus no place for them in the new order.
The neocons not only lost a policy battle. They also lost their perch, their perks, and their power in the party. That made, and still makes, Trump's victory intensely personal.
When the Trump haters set out to write their umpteenth denunciation of the president, calling him bad for the country, bad for the GOP, and bad for the world, they undoubtedly mean it. But they also have other motives. The rise of Donald Trump has above all been exceedingly bad for them. They're still angry about it, and they're still out for revenge, every single time they sit down to write.
Both leftists and neo-cons are obsessed with Trump the man. If they were really as high-minded as Linker says they are, they wouldn't take it all so personally. Besides being unhealthy, Trump-obsession is vicious and immoral. They should stop slandering him as a racist, xenophobe, Islamophobe, etc. and stop trying to 'get him' on some trumped-up charges. The more his enemies vilify him, the more support he will get from the Coalition of the Sane. What lefties and neo-cons should be discussing are his policy ideas. See Michael Anton, The Trump Doctrine.
We who support Trump do not do so because of his lack of class, his braggadoccio, his orange hair, inarticulate tweets, exaggerations, and other blemishes, but because he is a patriot* with good ideas and the will to implement them. He has delivered on his campaign promises despite the nasty obstructionism of the Dems, the media, and members of his own party. We support him because he is willing to punch back hard against the enemies of America foreign and domestic. We support him because he is not an ever-losing pussy like Jeb! Bush or a milque-toast maverick like John McCain.
____________
*Unlike Obama. No patriot seeks a fundamental transformation of his country. What you love you do not seek fundamentally to transform. Trump: MAGA. Obama, Hillary, and the Left: Destroy America as she was founded to be.
ADDENDUM (5/3). Jacques reacts:
A quick unsolicited thought about Linker's statement that the neocons were "too high minded to accept the debasement of the presidency and the party". It is utterly absurd to describe these people as "high minded". These are the same people who have supported futile bloody foreign adventures, for transparently phony reasons. These are the people who always support Israel and its ethnonationalist policies while denouncing even the slightest hint of ethnic consciousness in white Americans. Linker claims that they believe in the "goodness" of America. I doubt that most of them really believe in anything. They're utterly dishonest. Calling themselves "conservatives" (of any kind) is dishonest.But more importantly, it's absurd to think that the Republican party was "debased" by Trump. We are talking here about a racket. The function of the Republican party for many decades has been to fool its pathetic and deluded but fundamentally decent and patriotic base. The party pretends to care about the well-being and religion and values of these people, but has never done anything for them. On the contrary, the party represents crony capitalists, oligarchs, Washington insiders and lobbyists. The policies of the party have always been designed to benefit the wealthy con artists in the party and the wealthier donors and interests who control it.Just think of George W. Bush, that semi-literate fool, orchestrating war with Iraq on the basis of absurd lies about Hussein's connection to bin Laden. Millions died. Ordinary Americans were killed and maimed for nothing. At the same time, Bush was spouting leftist horseshit about "no child left behind" and getting teachers fired because they couldn't meet his Soviet-style diktats about the test scores that low IQ students were supposed to achieve. (Of course the teachers cheated. What were they supposed to do?) He also gave us such memorable phrases as "the religion of peace" and celebrated Ramadan at the White House. And all the while the country was being flooded with immigrants whose presence makes life ever more miserable for the Republican base.That was the neocon Republican party. The party of pointless killing and "regime change" with no plan beyond "elections". The party of leftist lies about race and IQ. The party of multicultural inclusion and corporate capitalism. Could that party be "debased"?From my perspective, Trump's tone is crude but–during his campaign at least–his message was infinitely more noble and high minded than anything these party insiders had ever said. True, they don't use swear words and they (maybe?) don't bang call girls. But their "ideas" were never anything more than a thin veneer meant to distract from their psychopathic greed and narcissism.
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The Professional Politician
The inner compass of the professional politician is a weather vane.